Between fiction and cinema: Brancati in Lattuada. The demythicisation of the figure of Don Juan from Brancati’s Don Juan in Sicily in Lattuada

Abstract

The aim of the present article is twofold: firstly, to demyhicise the famous “rooster” – a Sicilian Don Juan, both in the novel of Vitaliano Brancati (1907-1954) and in Albero Lattuada’s movie (1967), and, secondly, to present the allegoric and social aspects of the Sicilian provinces (Catania) and of a Lombardy metropolis (Milan), rich in anthropological and symbolic components of the time.

In the movie, the two roles, that of the husband – Juan, and of the wife – Ninetta confront each other, and, this way, the myth of the eternal “playboy”, Don Juan, is debunked. Juan changes his life refusing to follow the libertine tradition of the 18^th century, and his “romantic” success is no longer one-time; he remains a husband faithful to his wife. The wife, however, distances herself from him, becoming a female “Don Juan”. During the first party in Milan, Ninetta not only dresses up as a man, but even suggests him changing his life, to have the possibility of a libertine life. This way, two personalities of different cultures crash: that of the North (Swiss-Lombardy) and of the South (Sicilian); consequently, tradition crashes with a new lifestyle.

The director attempts at (re)reading individual stories of Brancati’s heroes as a huge market, where everything is sold or is for sale. In the complex allegoric masquerade of the Italian society, Lattuada stabilizes a parallel between being humane and having the virtue which personalizes almost everything. Therefore, under the teaching of his allegory, his humour is underlined in giving the feather an inhuman, enigmatic and comic character in the bourgeois social relations between the Sicilians and the Milanese; which constitute the plurality of the national identity in the united Italy after 1861.